Washington, D.C., 31 October 2002-- Forty years ago
today, the U.S. Navy forced to the surface a Soviet
submarine, which unbeknownst to the Navy, was carrying
a nuclear-tipped torpedo. This was the third surfacing
of a Soviet submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
After a day of persistent tracking by the U.S. destroyer,
the Charles P. Cecil, commanded by Captain Charles
Rozier, Soviet submarine B-36, commanded by Captain
Aleksei Dubivko, exhausted its batteries forcing it
to come to the surface. On 27 and 30 October respectively,
U.S. Navy anti-submarine warfare (ASW) forces surfaced
Soviet submarines B-59 and B-130. No one on the U.S.
side knew at the time that the Soviet submarines were
nuclear-armed; no one knew that conditions in the Soviet
submarines were so physically difficult and unstable
that commanding officers, fearing they were under attack
by U.S. forces, may have briefly considered arming the
nuclear torpedoes. Indeed, one of the incidents--the
effort to surface B-59 on 27 October 1962--occurred
on one of the most dangerous days of the missile crisis,
only hours after the Soviet shoot-down of a U-2 over
Cuba and as President Kennedy was intensifying threats
to invade Cuba.

The U.S.-Soviet conflict over nuclear deployments on
Cuba that produced the October 1962 crisis has necessarily
been a focal point of public interest, but the drama
that unfolded above and below Caribbean waters is now
receiving greater attention. While experts on the missile
crisis, as well as the participants themselves, have
been long aware of the cat-and-mouse game between U.S.ASW
forces and Soviet submarines during October and November
1962(1), only in recent months has
the hidden history of Soviet submarine operations during
the crisis become more widely known. In the spring of
2002, Russian researcher Alexander Mozgovoi began the
revelations when he published The Cuban Samba of
the Quartet of Foxtrots, which is available only
in Russian and was not released through ordinary commercial
channels.(2) Earlier this fall, U.S.
Navy veteran Peter A. Huchthausen, who served on the
U.S.S. Blandy during the crisis, published October
Fury, which for the first time brings together the
recollections of American and Russian participants in
the confrontation between U.S. destroyers and Soviet
submarines.(3) Thanks to Mozgovoi's
and Huchthausen's efforts, as well as the recent Havana
conference on the missile crisis which produced new
details on submarine operations,(4)
interested readers now know that Soviet "Foxtrot"
(NATO classification) submarines heading toward Cuba
were the spearhead of an effort to develop a Soviet
naval base at Mariel Bay, Cuba. One of the most startling
disclosures was that each of the submarines carried
a nuclear-tipped torpedo, which greatly raised the dangers
of an incident as the U.S. Navy carried out its efforts
to induce the beleaguered Soviet submariners to bring
their ships to the surface.(5)

During the missile crisis, U.S. naval officers did
not know about Soviet plans for a submarine base or
that the Foxtrot submarines were nuclear-armed. Nevertheless,
the Navy high command worried that the submarines, which
had already been detected in the north Atlantic, could
endanger enforcement of the blockade. Therefore, under
orders from the Pentagon, U.S. Naval forces carried
out systematic efforts to track Soviet submarines in
tandem with the plans to blockade, and possibly invade,
Cuba. While ordered not to attack the submarines, the
Navy received instructions on 23 October from Secretary
of Defense McNamara to signal Soviet submarines in order
to induce them to surface and identify themselves. Soon
messages conveying "Submarine Surfacing and Identification
Procedures" were transmitted to Moscow and other
governments around the world. The next morning, on 24
October, President Kennedy and the National Security
Council's Executive Committee (ExCom) discussed the
submarine threat and the dangers of an incident. According
to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, when Secretary of
Defense Robert McNamara reviewed the use of practice
depth charges (PDCs), the size of hand grenades, to
signal the submarines, "those few minutes were
the time of greatest worry to the President. His hand
went up to his face & he closed his fist" (see
document three). Within a few days, U.S. navy task groups
in the Caribbean had identified Soviet submarines in
the approaches to Cuba and were tracking them with all
of the detection technology that they had at their disposal.(6)

The U.S. effort to surface the Soviet submarines involved
considerable risk; exhausted by weeks undersea in difficult
circumstances and worried that the U.S. Navy's practice
depth charges were dangerous explosives, senior officers
on several of the submarines, notably B-59 and B-130,
were rattled enough to talk about firing nuclear torpedoes,
whose 15 kiloton explosive yields approximated the bomb
that devastated Hiroshima in August 1945. Huchthausen
includes a disquieting account of an incident aboard
submarine B-130, when U.S. destroyers were pitching
PDCs at it. In a move to impress the Communist Party
political officer, Captain Nikolai Shumkov ordered the
preparations of torpedoes, including the tube holding
the nuclear torpedo; the special weapon security officer
then warned Shumkov that the torpedo could not be armed
without permission from headquarters. After hearing
that the security officer had fainted, Shumkov told
his subordinates that he had no intention to use the
torpedo "because we would go up with it if we did."(7)

Possibly even more dangerous was an incident on submarine
B-59 recalled by Vadim Orlov, who served as a communications
intelligence officer. In an account published by Mozgovoi
(see document 16), Orlov recounted the tense and stressful
situation on 27 October when U.S. destroyers lobbed
PDCs at B-59. According to Orlov, a "totally exhausted"
Captain Valentin Savitsky, unable to establish communications
with Moscow, "became furious" and ordered
the nuclear torpedo to be assembled for battle readiness.
Savitsky roared "We're going to blast them now!
We will die, but we will sink them all." Deputy
brigade commander Second Captain Vasili Archipov calmed
Savitsky down and they made the decision to surface
the submarine. Orlov's description of the order to assemble
the nuclear torpedo is controversial and the other submarine
commanders do not believe that that Savitsky would have
made such a command.

Soviet submarine commanders were highly disciplined
and unlikely to use nuclear weapons by design, but the
unstable conditions on board raised the spectre of an
accident. Orlov himself believes that the major danger
was not from the unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon
but from an accident caused by the interaction of men
and machines under the most trying of circumstances.
Captain Joseph Bouchard, the author of a major study
on Naval operations during the missile crisis, supports
this point when he suggests that the "biggest danger"
was not from "deliberate acts" but from accidents,
such as an accidental torpedo launch.(8)
If the Soviets had used nuclear torpedoes, by accident
or otherwise, the U.S. would have made a "nuclear
counter-response."(9) U.S. aircraft
carriers had nuclear depth charges on board, while non-nuclear
components (all but the fissile material pit) for more
depth charges were stored at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (see
document 49). Fortunately, the U.S. and Soviet leadership,
from heads of state to naval commanders wanted to avoid
open conflict; cool heads, professionalism, and some
amount of luck, kept the crisis under control.

The documents that follow, culled mostly from the U.S.
Navy's operational archives,(10) show
how U.S. destroyers and patrol aircraft pursued Soviet
submarines during the crisis and after it had subsided,
in November. Some of the documents give an overview
of the submarine tracking operation while others provide
detail on the encounters with Soviet submarines in late
October and early November. Of the four submarines that
secretly left for Cuba on 1 October, the U.S. Navy detected
and closely tracked three: 1) B-36, commanded by Aleksei
Dubivko, and identified by the U.S. Navy as C-26 (and
later found to be identical with another identified
submarine C-20), 2) B-59, commanded by Valentin Savitsky,
and identified as C-19, and 3) B-130, commanded by Nikolai
Shumkov, and identified as C-18. Only submarine B-4,
commanded by Captain Rurik Ketov, escaped intensive
U.S. monitoring (although U.S. patrol aircraft may have
spotted it). In a major defeat of the Soviet mission,
these three submarines came to the surface under thorough
U.S. Navy scrutiny.

Some Soviet submarines may have escaped U.S. detection
altogether. While the four Soviet Foxtrot submarines
did not have combat orders, the Soviet Navy sent two
submarines, B-75 and B-88, to the Caribbean and the
Pacific respectively, with specific combat orders. B-75,
a "Zulu" class diesel submarine, commanded
by Captain Nikolai Natnenkov, carried two nuclear torpedoes.
It left Russian waters at the end of September with
instructions to defend Soviet transport ships en route
to Cuba with any weapons if the ships came under attack.
Although the Soviets originally intended to send a nuclear-powered
submarine for transport ship defense (see document 2),
only a diesel submarine was available. Once President
Kennedy announced the quarantine, the Soviet navy recalled
B-75 and it returned to the Soviet Union by 10 November,
if not earlier. Another submarine, B-88, left a base
at Kamchatka peninsula, on 28 October, with orders to
sail to Pearl Harbor and attack the base if the crisis
over Cuba escalated into U.S.-Soviet war. Commanded
by Captain Konstatine Kireev, B-88 arrived near Pearl
Harbor on 10 November and patrolled the area until 14
November when it received orders to return to base,
orders that were rescinded that same day, a sign that
Moscow believed that the crisis was not over. B-88 did
not return to Kamchatka under the very end of December.
While the U.S. Navy detected and surfaced most of the
submarines en route to Cuba, it remains to be seen whether
it detected any traces of submarines B-75 or B-88.(11)

13. Deck Log Book [Excerpts]
for U.S.S. Beale, DD 471, showing tracking and signaling
operations, with use of practice depth charges (PDCs),
and eventual surfacing of submarine C-19 on the evening
of 27 October (local time). The Beale was part of the
Randolph ASW task group 83.2.Source: National Archives, Record Group
24, Records of Bureau of Naval Personnel (hereinafter
cited as RG 24), Deck Logs 1962, box 74

37. CTG 135.1 cable to COMASWFORLANT,
3 November 1962, providing status report on contacts
with C-21 : "our attitude has changed from confidence
to frustration to doubt as the nature of the contacts
varied. My present evaluation [is] that the original
contact was a positive sub sighting."Source: CHF, 21 (A) SS/ASW Contacts (Closed)-2

The following charts showing ship deployments and movements
on each day of the Cuban missile crisis were the work
of "Flag Plot" and "ASW plot," special
components of the office of the Chief of Naval Operations.
With these charts, formerly classified "Top Secret",
one can track the massive buildup of blockade and invasion
forces during the days after 22 October as well as the
systematic effort to locate Soviet submarines and other
Soviet ships. As the intensity of the crisis grew, the
demands of senior officials for more timely information
led Flag Plot to produce these charts four times daily;
as the crisis ebbed, however, charts were produced only
once a day. As the details of submarine sightings accumulated,
by the end of October CNO staffers began to produce
a daily "ASW Plot" chart that included brief
summaries of encounters with Soviet submarines.

4. Photograph of Soviet submarine
B-36 (conning tower number 911), taken by U.S. Navy
photographers, circa 31 October-2 November 1962Source: U.S. National Archives, Still
Pictures Branch, Record Group 428, Item 428-N-711198

5. For press coverage of these
revelations as well as of the Havana conference, see
"Soviets Set to Fire," Sunday Herald Sun
(Melbourne), 23 June 2002; 'How Cuban Crisis Put World
Minutes from Nuclear Oblivion," The Scotsman,
13 October 2002, and "Soviets Close to Using A-Bomb
in 1962 Crisis, Forum is Told," The Boston Globe,
13 October 2002, and "Forty Years After Missile
Crisis, Players Swap Stories," The Washington
Post, 13 October 2002.

6. For details, see Bouchard,
Command in Crisis, pp. 120-121. See also Office
of the Chief of Naval Operations, "The Naval Quarantine
of Cuba, 1962", 1963, posted at <http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq90-5.htm>.
For the ExCom meeting, see Philip Zelikow and Ernest
R. May, editors. The Presidential Recordings John
F. Kennedy, The Great Crises, Vol. III (New York,
W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 190-194.

8. Interview with Vadim Orlov
by Svetlana Savranskaya, National Security Archive,
17 October 2002, Moscow; Captain Joseph Bouchard, communication
with editor, 16 September 2002. Indicating what can
go wrong, Bouchard cited the accidental launching of
a torpedo by a Soviet destroyer during a NATO exercise
in October 1983 and a torpedo inadvertently accidentally
launched by a U.S. Navy frigate in December 1983. See
London Times, 8 October 1973, and Washington
Post, 20 December 1983.

10. Unfortunately, files at the operational
archives that were open to researchers last spring are
now closed until at least March 2003 while the archives
undergoes renovation of its records storage system.
See <http://www.history.navy.mil/branches/nhcorg10.htm>

11. Alexander Mozgovoi, The Cuban
Samba of the Quartet of Foxtrots; interviews with
Alexander Mozgovoi and Vadim Orlov by Svetlana Savranskaya,
National Security Archive, 16 and 17 October 2002, Moscow.

12. Magnetic anomaly sensors are "used
to detect the natural and manmade differences in the
Earth's magnetic field."; the passing of large
ferrous objects such as ships and submarines passing
through the earth's magnetic field can produce detectable
changes. To detect a change or anomaly an ASW aircraft
mut be practically overhead or very close to a submarine's
position. See Federation of American Scientists, Military
Analysis Network, "Air Anti-Submarine Warfare,"
<http://www.fas.org/man/dod/-101/sys/ac/asw.htm>.

13. SOSUS is the Navy's strategic
underwater network of passive sonar (sound navigation
and ranging) detectors and hydrophones deployed on the
ocean floor to detect and differentiate submarine noise
from normal oceanic background sound. The hydrophones
are deployed at major natural choke points that the
shipping of adversaries is forced to use. An early SOSUS
station was established in the Bahamas. See S. F. Tomajczk,
Dictionary of the Modern United States Military
(Jefferson, North Carolina, McFarland & Company,
1996).

14. Julie and Jezebell are types of sonobouys that
use sonar technology to detect a submarine either actively
(through reflected acoustical pulse), or passively,
by detecting sound, for example, with hydrophones. Most
sonobouys are small and cylindrical in shape and are
distributed by aircraft or ships. Julie sonobouys release
charges that explode at predetermined depths to provide
echo-ranging data, while Jezebel sonobouys are airborne
devices that can detect low-frequency sounds originating
from underwater sources of energy. See Tomajczk, Dictionary
of the Modern United States Military, for entries
on SONAR, sonobouys, Jezebel and Julie.

15. See note 11 (above).

16. Huchthausen, October Fury,
p. 234.

17. Standing for Quebec, Q signified
Eastern Daylight Time plus four hours. An explanation
of changes in the time scheme is unavailable; see Office
of the Chief of Naval Operations, "The Naval Quarantine
of Cuba, 1962", p. 1.